Is it fair to make low-income residents balance out rich people's outrageous carbon footprints?
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San Jose prides itself for carbon neutrality initiatives like banning natural gas infrastructure in new construction (and that'll cost homeowners a pretty penny). But a recent Oxfam International study discovers that the world's richest 1% are culpable for—gulp—16% of carbon emissions. Why, Phys.org asks, do policymakers regressively target low-income people's kitchens, while giving a free pass to the wealthy's personal travel on carbon-spewing airplanes and large company investments?
The richest one percent of the global population are responsible for the same amount of carbon emissions as the world's poorest two-thirds, or five billion people, according to an analysis published Sunday by the nonprofit Oxfam International.
While fighting the climate crisis is a shared challenge, not everyone is equally responsible and government policies must be tailored accordingly, Max Lawson, who co-authored the report, told AFP.
"The richer you are, the easier it is to cut both your personal and your investment emissions," he said. "You don't need that third car, or that fourth holiday, or you don't need to be invested in the cement industry." …
Among the key findings of this study are that the richest one percent globally—77 million people—were responsible for 16 percent of global emissions related to their consumption.
That is the same share as the bottom 66 percent of the global population by income, or 5.11 billion people. …
The key message, according to Lawson, was that policy actions must be progressive.
"We think that unless governments enact climate policy that is progressive, where you see the people who emit the most being asked to take the biggest sacrifices, then we're never going to get good politics around this," he said.
These measures could include, for example, a tax on flying more than ten times a year, or a tax on non-green investments that is much higher than the tax on green investments.
While the current report focused on carbon linked only to individual consumption, "the personal consumption of the super-rich is dwarfed by emissions resulting from their investments in companies," the report found.
This article originally appeared in Phys.org. Read the whole thing here.
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